part of the story (is the end)
by TolkienGirl
Summary: Hold your breath, and count to ten. [Sum quote from Skyfall; internal quotations from Richard Siken. Endgame character study.]


**A/N: This is a poem by Richard Siken, called "litany in which certain things are crossed out" and it is a poem that means love and humanity and brokenness to me. So I framed a tribute to the Endgame trailer with it. Enjoy.**

 _Every morning the maple leaves._

 _Every morning another chapter where the hero shifts_

 _from one foot to the other. Every morning the same big_

 _and little words all spelling out desire, all spelling out_

 _**You will be alone always and then you will die.**_

.

What were his words, exactly? Fury's words, six years ago: _I'm here to talk to you about…the Avengers Initiative_.

Fury's gone. They found his car. They found a heap of dust.

And if you had died when you were supposed to, it would all be the same. No Bucky, no Peggy, no Sam. It is only because you lived that you had to lose them twice.

You hung up the shield like you were doing fate a service. You hung up old grudges like they were yours to forgive. And Tony—where the hell is Tony? There's no way to know who's still around until they come to you. You stare at your own hands, some days, and wonder why half the world is gone and you're not.

 _Oh, God_.

Some days, it really does seem like you'll live forever, or live, at least, until no one else is left.

.

 _So maybe I wanted to give you something more than a catalog_

 _of non-definitive acts,_

 _something other than the desperation._

 _Dear So-and-So, I'm sorry I couldn't come to your party._

 _Dear So-and-So, I'm sorry I came to your party_

 _and seduced you_

 _and left you bruised and ruined, you poor sad thing._

.

Wakanda gave you all so much. And you left them broken, crumbled as they've never been before. You're a spy, you're used to the incision that a blade makes, so thin and deadly. This is no incision, it's an explosion, and the ash once formed faces that you knew. (Loved?)

You're not Steve. You never claimed to be a ruler. You're in the shadows, and the shadows always look like death.

Wakanda would be broken now, whether you had hidden there or not. Thanos was coming.

He was always coming, and he was always going to win. Spies know the odds, so you knew that.

For what it's worth, spies don't know everything. Don't know what it feels like to come face-to-face with an old friend, when friendship is itself an old and weary thing.

Clint survived. One look at his face tells you that his family didn't.

.

 _You want a better story. Who wouldn't?_

 _A forest, then. Beautiful trees. And a lady singing._

 ** _Love on the water, love underwater, love, love and so on._**

 _What a sweet lady. Sing lady, sing! Of course, she wakes the dragon._

 _Love always wakes the dragon and suddenly_

 _flames everywhere._

.

You fell in love with a fiery redhead. She kept the fire to a low, steady, sparking simmer and you flocked like a moth to that elusive heat. You loved her until she couldn't love you anymore. You loved her until she came back. And you have left her, twice, to rocket skyward, in the temple of armor you built.

Dying in space is the way you'd want to go out, if you'd been asked. If anybody had asked you, at twelve or fifteen, or nineteen, _how do you want to die, how do you want to tear apart the godawful threads that are holding you together, how do you want to die?_

You would have said something stupid, then, but you would have dreamed of flying all the same.

When you were nineteen, a car-wreck, in all the breathtaking ugliness that only twisted metal can claim, killed two people in very little space.

Nobody asked them.

So you're going to be fragments, up here. You're going to be fragments, when the oxygen runs out. That seems right, too. Seems like a way to keep your promise to the boy who died while you held him, until you couldn't hold him anymore.

.

 _I can tell already you think I'm the dragon,_

 _that would be so like me, but I'm not. I'm not the dragon._

 _I'm not the princess either._

 _Who am I? I'm just a writer. I write things down._

 _I walk through your dreams and invent the future. Sure,_

 _I sink the boat of love, but that comes later. And yes, I swallow_

 _glass, but that comes later._

.

Someone should tell these stories. Maybe it _should_ be you—no scribe, no poet. But a warrior, and a god, who has lived long.

But if you still laughed, you would laugh at these…these _titles_. You are no god on this divided planet. You are no savior, no victor. You can only, after all, _half_ -see.

You spent a thousand years doing no more than these mortals have done in a hundred. Your purpose only began when you joined them, and yet—

Yet, it was so quickly spent.

You find, amid all the ruin of loss, that _his_ loss still stings the most. If Loki had lived, would he have been turned to dust anyway? He kept doom at bay for so many rounds of time. It crushed him in the end.

This, you think, battered and bruised with your hands on your knees and a cold gray world around you—

This is neither a people nor a place.

Neither hope nor faith, nor even any future.

.

 _And the part where I push you_

 _flush against the wall and every part of your body rubs against the bricks,_

 _shut up_

 _I'm getting to it._

 _For a while I thought I was the dragon._

 _I guess I can tell you that now. And, for a while, I thought I was_

 _the princess,_

 _cotton candy pink, sitting there in my room, in the tower of the castle,_

 _young and beautiful and in love and waiting for you with_

 _confidence_

 _but the princess looks into her mirror and only sees the princess,_

 _while I'm out here, slogging through the mud, breathing fire,_

 _and getting stabbed to death._

 _Okay, so I'm the dragon. Big deal._

 _You still get to be the hero._

.

So here it is, in fluorescent lights and swan-diving planes and school cancellations: Peter Parker is one of the fallen. Peter Parker isn't coming back.

Your mom made it. Your dad didn't, but you hadn't seen him in three years so the pain should be numbed. _Should_ is the operative word.

School doesn't reopen. Half the staff has disappeared. Half the students, too. You haven't heard from Ned. You can't bear to text him, until one day, you fire off, _You OK?_ Because, hey, he might be wondering about you too.

No response.

No response.

 _I knew, you big dummy_ , you want to shout—down the street, or at the gray sky. The sky feels more right, somehow, though you don't know why. _I knew who you really were._

It's the past tense that kills you.

 _Here lies Michelle Jones, who lived._

.

 _You get magic gloves! A fish that talks! You get eyes like flashlights!_

 _What more do you want?_

 _I make you pancakes, I take you hunting, I talk to you as if you're_

 _really there._

 _Are you there, sweetheart? Do you know me? Is this microphone live?_

 _Let me do it right for once,_

 _for the record, let me make a thing of cream and stars that becomes,_

 _you know the story, simply heaven._

 _Inside your head you hear a phone ringing_

 _and when you open your eyes_

 _only a clearing with deer in it. Hello deer._

 _Inside your head the sound of glass,_

 _a car crash sound as the trucks roll over and explode in slow motion._

 _Hello darling, sorry about that._

 _Sorry about the bony elbows, sorry we_

 _lived here, sorry about the scene at the bottom of the stairwell_

 _and how I ruined everything by saying it out loud._

.

You shouted for Laura until your voice went hoarse. You didn't think you were going to run out of fear that quickly, didn't think that you'd feel… _almost nothing_ …when the little heaps of dust flaked against the toes of your boots.

All of them. Gone. Half a jar of baby food still open on the counter; Legos strewn on the floor. You stop shouting. You stop fearing. You know.

And hell is on earth, so you pick up the bow again. Hell is on earth, so you find a way to be better at what you used to do. You eat and sleep because you have to. You take joy in nothing, and you don't even tell anyone that you are back in the game.

(There is no game.)

(You think, this must be their fault. _Your fault_. The sky opened again for a reason, releasing… _something_ , because there was something on earth to fight.)

.

 _There weren't_

 _Especially that, but I should have known._

 _You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together_

 _to make a creature that will do what I say_

 _or love me back._

 _I'm not really sure why I do it, but in this version you are not_

 _feeding yourself to a bad man_

 _against a black sky prickled with small lights._

 _I take it back._

 _The wooden halls like caskets. These terms from the lower depths._

 _I take them back._

 _Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed._

.

So, so. We are never going back. Not to the past, not to the time when there was a green stone that could have saved us. Not to the way the world was torn by war and stitched together by the promise of heroes. The Battle of New York made the world stand still.

Two years drifting apart, two years after betrayal, two men.

Could they have saved something, if they hadn't been so bent on silence?

Who are we, if not privileged to keep our own grudges?

.

 _Crossed out._

 _Clumsy hands in a dark room. Crossed out. There is something_

 _underneath the floorboards._

 _Crossed out. And here is the tabernacle_

 _reconstructed._

 _Here is the part where everyone was happy all the time and we were all_

 _forgiven,_

 _even though we didn't deserve it._

 _Inside your head you hear_

 _a phone ringing, and when you open your eyes you're washing up_

 _in a stranger's bathroom,_

 _standing by the window in a yellow towel, only twenty minutes away_

 _from the dirtiest thing you know._

 _All the rooms of the castle except this one, says someone, and suddenly_

 _darkness,_

 _suddenly only darkness._

.

You didn't die, but half of you lay sleeping through the battle. You didn't die, because you always spit the bullets out even if they make it past your teeth.

What does it mean, always being angry? What does anything mean, when you left the Earth to itself, only to discover, in its ending, that you loved it?

Doctor, scientist, monster, man. Bruce Banner lights a cigarette and smokes it down to nothing. The glow is like a lit taper, and you could say a prayer of remembrance for all those gone before, if you still believed in anything.

.

 _In the living room, in the broken yard,_

 _in the back of the car as the lights go by. In the airport_

 _bathroom's gurgle and flush, bathed in a pharmacy of_

 _unnatural light,_

 _my hands looking weird, my face weird, my feet too far away._

 _And then the airplane, the window seat over the wing with a view_

 _of the wing and a little foil bag of peanuts._

 _I arrived in the city and you met me at the station,_

 _smiling in a way_

 _that made me frightened. Down the alley, around the arcade,_

 _up the stairs of the building_

 _to the little room with the broken faucets, your drawings, all your things,_

 _I looked out the window and said_

 _**This doesn't look that much different from home,**_

 _because it didn't,_

 _but then I noticed the black sky and all those lights._

 _We walked through the house to the elevated train._

 _All these buildings, all that glass and the shiny beautiful_

 _mechanical wind._

.

Back to you again. You, lost in space. You don't like it so well as you thought you would. It turns out that Tony Stark is a man of earth. Iron is blood, isn't it? And Earth runs with its own blood, its own rhythm. You were born in a cave and you'll die in the hollow, convex scope of something greater.

You want to go back. You want to fall, you want to die because your bones can't bear the impact of gravity, you want to go back in time and not fuck this up like you did. You could say goodbye to your dad properly, not just in hologram. You could stop their car, you could stop the boy from following you. You could have never met him in the first place, just watched from afar.

(Who the hell brings a kid to a civil war anyway?)

So, it's space. It's space and it's dark and you're dying. Food and water and oxygen are all things that have no use, no purpose to iron.

And what are you, on the gleaming suit, on the gleaming edge of time?

.

 _Rust_.

 _We were inside the train car when I started to cry. You were crying too,_

 _smiling and crying in a way that made me_

 _even more hysterical. You said I could have anything I wanted, but I_

 _just couldn't say it out loud._

 _Actually, you said **Love, for you,**_

 ** _is larger than the usual romantic love. It's like a religion. It's_**

 ** _terrifying. No one_**

 ** _will ever want to sleep with you._**

 _._

You have a plan that isn't a plan. You're a man who loved a woman in a compass, and who remembers her then, not the way she is now, not the way she's in the ground.

 _This is going to work_ , you say, both to yourself and aloud, to anyone still left to hear you. _This is going to work._

You fly into freedom the way most men march into war.

(You would know.)

.

 _Okay, if you're so great, you do it—_

 _here's the pencil, make it work . . ._

 _If the window is on your right, you are in your own bed. If the window_

 _is over your heart, and it is painted shut, then we are breathing_

 _river water._

 _Build me a city and call it Jerusalem. Build me another and call it_

 _Jerusalem._

.

In an empty wine store, in the city you once saved, you take two bottles. You leave two gold coins on the counter, carefully, beside traces of gray dust.

When you find green—and there is still green, in this city, though half the birds are silent in the trees—you pour one bottle into the soil.

 _For you, brother_. He was a trickster, not a seer. An illusionist, not a visionary.

You wonder, all the same, what he knew.

 _The sun will shine on us again_.

He said it like he believed it. That was the way, of course, that he told both truth and lies.

.

 _We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not_

 _what we sought, so do it over, give me another version,_

 _a different room, another hallway, the kitchen painted over_

 _and over,_

 _another bowl of soup._

 _The entire history of human desire takes about seventy minutes to tell._

 _Unfortunately, we don't have that kind of time._

.

You're on a mission, and you're never going to save everyone. You were never meant to. Wasn't it in cold Russia—wasn't it Stalin who said that a million deaths was only a statistic?

But you felt this. You felt them, as they died. So did Steve, and so did everyone.

Still, you're most surprised to find that _you_ had a heart.

You're not so alone as you thought you were, and that is selfish. You're not so steely-skinned as you thought you were, and that is pain.

Natasha Romanoff made it out of the Red Room, and out of the Kremlin, and out of too many jaws of death.

 _This will work, Steve._

Faith, sometimes, is an accidental acquisition. So is love.

.

 _Forget the dragon,_

 _leave the gun on the table, this has nothing to do with happiness._

 _Let's jump ahead to the moment of epiphany,_

 _in gold light, as the camera pans to where_

 _the action is,_

 _lakeside and backlit, and it all falls into frame, close enough to see_

 _the blue rings of my eyes as I say_

 _something ugly._

.

An experiment, gone wrong. How much of the world can _that_ explain? You, surely. The other you, overtaking you. But it also explains Tony, at his best and worst, and it explains the way that humanity toils on, relentless and dry-eyed, even in the face of tragedy.

If only Thanos had understood that. You don't imagine he wanted to. Scientists are confronted with the humiliation of works that become more than their own; gods are too distant, too vast, too comfortable to only look through their own lenses.

To run their own gauntlets, and run them to ruin.

.

 _I never liked that ending either. More love streaming out the wrong way,_

 _and I don't want to be the kind that says the wrong way._

 _But it doesn't work, these erasures, this constant refolding of the pleats._

 _There were some nice parts, sure,_

 _all lemondrop and mellonball, laughing in silk pajamas_

 _and the grains of sugar_

 _on the toast, love love or whatever, take a number. I'm sorry_

 _it's such a lousy story._

.

There were eight million people in New York City.

Were, were, were. The president of the United States is ash, the Speaker of the House is ash, the preacher of a Baptist church in Wyomissing, Pennsylvania was reduced to nothing with half his congregation.

It is something, truly, that there are any heroes left.

It is something, truly, that they keep fighting.

If they can't save the earth, they can damn well—

They can—

They must.

.

 _Dear Forgiveness, y_ _ou know that recently_

 _we have had our difficulties and there are many things_

 _I want to ask you._

 _I tried that one time, high school, second lunch, and then again,_

 _years later, in the chlorinated pool._

 _I am still talking to you about help. I still do not have_

 _these luxuries._

 _I have told you where I'm coming from, so put it together._

 _**We clutch our bellies and roll on the floor . . .**_

 _When I say this, it should mean laughter,_

 _not poison._

 _I want more applesauce. I want more seats reserved for heroes._

 _Dear Forgiveness, I saved a plate for you._

 _Quit milling around the yard and come inside._


End file.
